Between 1933 and 1940, Manchester received between seven and eight thousand refugees from Fascist Europe. They included Jewish academics expelled from universities in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. Around two hundred were children from the Basque country of Spain evacuated to Britain on a temporary basis in 1937 as the fighting of the Spanish Civil War neared their home towns. Most were refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As much as 95% of the refugees from Nazism were Jews threatened by the increasingly violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The rest were Communists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Liberals, Confessional Christians and Sudeten Germans. There have been several valuable studies of the response of the British government to the refugee crisis. This study seeks to assess the responses in one city—Manchester—which had long cultivated an image of itself as a ‘liberal city’. Using documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Manchester refugees, it explores the work of those sectors of local society that took part in the work of rescue: Jewish communal organisations, the Society of Friends, the Rotarians, the University of Manchester, secondary schools in and around Manchester, pacifist bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and industrialists from the Manchester region. The book considers the reasons for their choices to help to assesses their degree of success and the forces which limited their effectiveness.

1999, a plaque
was unveiled at the House of Commons ‘In deep gratitude to the people
and Parliament of the United Kingdom for saving the lives of 10,000 Jewish
and other children who fled to this country from Nazipersecution on the
126
The Kinder
Kindertransport 1938–1939’.44 From its earliest days, saved has been the description used to justify and then to celebrate the movement of refugee children
to Britain. With its Christological connotations, the word emphasises the role
played by the rescuers and tends to subsume the individuality of the rescued.
The first

entering Britain as a result of Nazipersecution, this support was based on that leadership’s estimation that it would only need support for around 4,000. However, the German occupation of Austria in March 1938 and of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 dramatically increased the number of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution (increasing to about 55,000 arriving in Britain by 1939, at a cost to the Jewish community of more than £3,000,000) 69 and furthermore the outbreak of war prevented Jewish refugees from returning. As a result, British Jews were faced with providing long

never, ever become a bystander.18 Such
identification inevitably renders bystander History more morally
immanent than some fields of enquiry even into the Holocaust,
because, as David Wyman argues, ‘we were the all too passive
accomplices’ to the Shoah.19
But who exactly were the bystanders in the past? Der
Stellvertreter was Deputy of us all. The Vicar of Christ stood as
the conscience of all humanity, representative of all humankind
who were in a sense the bystanders to Nazipersecution. But
historians cannot draw the category so widely. Functionally it is
not even

subsequently was designed to prepare for war, not to prevent it. In
April, the introduction of military conscription was announced – the first time
in British history that such a measure had been introduced in peacetime.
Among the signs of impending war was the growing number of Germanspeaking refugees arriving in Britain. The Nazipersecution of Jews in the
months after the Anschluss had forced a stream of refugees to leave Austria.
By the end of 1938, the stream had become a flood, as the horrors of the
‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom caused a mass flight of Jews from Greater

genocide – disguises the fact that the first victims of Nazipersecution
were their political and ideological opponents: Communists, Socialists,
trade unionists, pacifists and liberals.
The majority of ‘political’ refugees who fled Nazi Germany did so – in
contrast to the majority of their Jewish counterparts – before the end of
1933. On the night of 27 February 1933, the Reichstag was set on fire.
While it has never been established beyond doubt whether the Nazis
themselves were responsible, they certainly exploited the event to settle
accounts with their political

reported the beginning
of the trial, which is invariably hailed as a watershed moment in
the development of Holocaust narratives. Because much of the
prosecution case rested on surviving witnesses to Nazipersecution
it transformed the role of survivors and persuaded many to tell
their own stories for the first time. A plethora of publications
followed – both from survivors and those examining the rapidly
iconic Eichmann.3 The most important was Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a collection of her court reports previously published

constructed in the immediate post-war era, chiefly because the persecution of the Jews was
not its main focus and appears to have been lost amidst a general
horror at Nazipersecution.2
Kogon’s analysis was, to a great degree, autobiographical –
based on his own experiences in Buchenwald. But he aimed also to
say something about whole camp structure and its crimes. Buchenwald stood as representative of Nazi iniquity. Yet, as it was
dedicated to mainly political punishment and latterly the distribution of slave labour, Buchenwald was entirely different to those
‘death camps

Jews fled the Nazipersecution – including the dramatic stories of the Kindertransport and the later arrival of holocaust survivors. The hostile political environment also spawned smaller scale Jewish immigration from Egypt in the 1950s and Iran in the 1960s and 1970s. Migration is actually not just about transnational incomers, and as Leeds developed further as a vibrant commercial and industrial centre in the twentieth century, so it attracted many Jewish citizens from elsewhere in Britain who were motivated by career and job opportunities. These were perhaps more

Representing Jewish wartime experience in French crime fiction of the 1950s and 1960s

Claire Gorrara

notes, during the 1950s and 1960s: ‘the awareness, the prise de conscience,
of the specificity of the Jewish experience in the universe of Nazipersecution had not permeated public opinion and that in reactions towards the
survivors of genocide open hostility often prevailed’.8 Lagrou grapples
• 43 •
French crime fiction and the Second World War
sensitively with the reasons for such marginalisation. These encompass
the side-lining of Jewish war experiences due to post-war anti-Semitism
which propagated images of Jewish treason and the lack of a Jewish